I’m asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application.
I’m looking for something
- in the Fediverse
- with technology that supports discussions
- where users know the Fediverse beyond whatever software that particular place is running on
- where users know something about how and why to make Fediverse posts accessible for e.g. blind users
- where users take this topic seriously instead of seeing it as a gimmick
- where it’s likely enough for someone to reply to posts
Mastodon takes accessibility very seriously. But Mastodon users never look beyond Mastodon. Every other Mastodon user doesn’t even know that the Fediverse is more than only Mastodon. Most of those who do have no idea what the rest of the Fediverse is like, including what it can do that Mastodon can’t, and what it can’t do that Mastodon can. Many Mastodon users even reject the Fediverse outside Mastodon, and be it because it “refuses” to fully adopt Mastodon’s culture and throw its own cultures overboard. This would include using features that Mastodon doesn’t have. You’re easily being muted or blocked upon first strike if you dare to post more than 500 characters at once.
I myself am mostly on Hubzilla. Not only is Hubzilla vastly more powerful than Mastodon, it is also vastly different, and being older than Mastodon as well, it had grown its own culture before Mastodon came along. Still, three out of four Mastodon users have never even heard of the existence of Hubzilla, and many who do are likely to think it’s basically Mastodon with a higher character count, extra stuff glued on and a clunky UI.
If you try to discuss Fediverse accessibility on Mastodon, you end up only discussing Mastodon accessibility with exactly zero regards, understanding or interest for what the rest of the Fediverse is like.
Besides, Mastodon has no good support for conversations and no real concept of threads. It is impossible to follow a discussion thread or to even only know that there have been new replies without having been mentioned in these replies. Thus, any attempt at discussing something on Mastodon is futile.
Hubzilla itself is great for discussions. It even has had groups/forums as a feature from the very beginning. In practice, however, it has precious few forums. The same applies to (streams) even more.
Discussing Fediverse accessibility is completely futile on both. They don’t “do accessibility”. To their users, alt-text is some fad that was invented on Mastodon, and Hubzilla and (streams) don’t do Mastodon crap, full stop. In fact, their users hate Mastodon with a passion for deliberately, intentionally being so limited and trying to push its own limitations, its proprietary, non-standard solutions and its culture upon the rest of the Fediverse. At the same time, they don’t really know that much about Mastodon, and they aren’t interested in it.
Most of this applies to Friendica as well, but Hubzilla and (streams) users sometimes go as far as disabling ActivityPub altogether to keep Mastodon and the other ActivityPub-based microblogging projects out, and they don’t care if Friendica ends up collateral damage. They hate the non-nomadic majority of the Fediverse that much.
If you try to discuss Fediverse accessibility on Hubzilla, nobody would know what you’re even talking about, and nobody would want to know because they take it for another stupid Mastodon fad. They probably don’t even understand why I accept connection requests from Mastodon in the first place.
Here on Lemmy, I’ve seen a number of dedicated accessibility communities. But they seem to be only about accessibility on the greater Web and in real life and not a bit about accessibility in the Fediverse specifically. I’m not even sure if Lemmy itself “does accessibility” in any way. And I’m not sure how aware Lemmy is of the Fediverse beyond Lemmy, /kbin and Mastodon.
Besides, these communities aren’t much more than the admin posting stuff and nobody ever replying. So I guess trying to actually discuss something there is completely useless. If I post a question, I’ll probably never get a reply.
The reason why I’m asking here first is because this community is actually active enough for people to reply to posts. But I’m not sure if it’s good for discussing super-specific details about making non-Threadiverse Fediverse posts accessible.
Judging by the history of this community, I’d say you’re invited to discuss it here. But it won’t change anything. You’d get back a few random opinions of other Lemmy users. But I’m not sure if anyone concerned with the development process reads this. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
And I’m not sure about the Lemmy software. The developers always say they have enough on their plate. UI changes are rare. And they mostly implement what’s on their agenda, not what users wish for.
If I were you, I’d take this to one of the newer projects that’s going to replace Lemmy at some point. That would be PieFed for example. They’re pretty active and welcoming and open to suggestions. I think accessibility is already on their agenda: see https://piefed.social/post/17408
Another tip: The real discussions regarding software development usually don’t happen on social media. You’d need to go to the project page on GitHub or Codeberg (in this example) if you want to get in contact with the development community.
I wasn’t talking about the dev side/Fediverse frontend development.
I was talking about the end user side, about the requirements to make Fediverse posts accessible, especially image descriptions.
Thing is, on Mastodon, it’s pretty much mandatory to give a useful description for every last image you post, If your posts reach Mastodon, your images better be described sufficiently. But everyone’s just got “the Mastodon way” stuck in their heads which is built around only having 500 characters in posts, and nobody can imagine there being images that are much different from Mastodon/Twitter screenshots nor cat photographs.
And everywhere that isn’t Mastodon, nobody has even heard of alt-text or image descriptions, or if they have, they think it’s another stupid Mastodon fad.
That’s what I have mostly got on my mind.
Alright. I didn’t get that. But I think my recommendation still holds true. As you found out already, it’s not happening unless the UI incentivises the users to do so. I think most users don’t care about accessibility or aren’t educated on the subject. It’s just not something within their lives/perspective. So I think if you want to solve that issue, it has to happen in the UI and the software developers have to nudge people to do it.
If you want to talk to a few users, I think this place is as good as any.
I think most users don’t care about accessibility or aren’t educated on the subject.
On Mastodon, this happens much more quickly than you might imagine.
Post an image without alt-text, especially on a big, general-purpose, notorious newbie instance, and there’ll likely be someone who asks you to add an alt-text to your image.
Unless you keep yourself inside a small special interest bubble with no contact to the outside Fediverse, you will be educated on the subject, whether you want or not.
And Mastodon users don’t care if whoever they educate about alt-text and image descriptions is on Mastodon or elsewhere because they can’t see where someone is, at least not at first glance.
That sounds like a tricky combination. Wherever you go, they’ll be a good chunk of users who are unaware of / indifferent to how well the app they’re using interacts with other Fediverse platforms. Mastodon has the userbase, and - as you say - is the place where the serious discussion of accessibility takes place.
As for Lemmy - it doesn’t yet support alt-text, but when it does, I believe that the plan is to follow Mastodon’s format (i.e. a ‘name’ field in the ‘attachment’ array)
Oh right, yeah. I was thinking more of the images that people link to with posts. Lemmy currently sends those out, with
"attachment": [
{
"href": "https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e798447e-a79f-45b2-b3da-3aa669cbc0e5.png",
"type": "Link"
}
]
But there’s nowhere in entire JSON for any alt-text. The plan is to add alt-text as a ‘name’ in there.
In-line images do prove a point for the OP, though. A Lemmy comment with one will be sent out as
<img src=\"[https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9d483052-29b6-4d34-baaf-3ee092be9718.png\](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9d483052-29b6-4d34-baaf-3ee092be9718.png\)" alt=\"bear vs man in woods meme\" /> in the ‘content’ field, but Mastodon expects all images to be attachments, so it just completely ignores it. (compare https://lemmy.zip/comment/10342640 with https://mastodon.social/@Honytawk@lemmy.zip/112438348076482957)..)
Mastodon has the userbase, and - as you say - is the place where the serious discussion of accessibility takes place.
There’s no discussion taking place.
Mastodon is horribly bad for discussions because the more people discuss something, the more mentions have to eat away on the 500-character limit.
Instead, there seems to be total consent for how things are done on Mastodon right now. Even though this way of doing things a) doesn’t work in niche situations unknown to Mastodon users and b) make no sense if you take away Mastodon’s limitations, e.g. everywhere else in the Fediverse that isn’t Mastodon. Nope, no questioning the Mastodon way. How could you even.
Note that tons of instances have increased the limit FAR beyond 500 chars. Mine has 2000.
I think a good approach could be to think about how you could reach users of different platforms.
A lot of Mastodon users follow hashtags, so including relevant hashtags (#accessibility and #blind seem like good starting points) might be a good idea. Tagging groups, such as @accessibility@a.gup.pe, might also help.
I think Kbin/Mbin might be better suited for this than Lemmy, as it integrates better with other federated networks. You can follow microbloggers and boost content, which in turn makes them likely to follow you back and creates a community beyond which Lemmy community you choose to post in. Your Mastodon followers will see your posts, but it won’t matter to them which community you post it in.
It’s hard for content to make the jump from Lemmy to Mastodon as Lemmy does not make itself discoverable, but as soon as content reaches Mastodon users nothing stops them from interacting with it (by boosting or replying).
Sadly Kbin.social lacks sufficiently active moderation these days, so you might be better off with an mbin instance. I also have no idea how accessible Mbin is to blind users.
Edit: I over-emphasized the point about reaching a broader audience. If you want to discuss a narrow topic but you don’t want most ActivityPub users to see it because you don’t value their input, I guess Lemmy is as good as it gets.
A lot of Mastodon users follow hashtags, so including relevant hashtags (#accessibility and #blind seem like good starting points) might be a good idea. Tagging groups, such as @accessibility@a.gup.pe, might also help.
As I’ve already said, for someone who is not on Mastodon, it’s pretty much worthless to try and discuss Fediverse post accessibility as applied on something that isn’t Mastodon with people who are on Mastodon. And Guppe is practically exclusively used by Mastodon users.
One example: Many Mastodon users have stuck in their heads that you can’t post more than 500 characters in the Fediverse. For even more Mastodon users, “alt-text” and “image description” are 100% mutually synonymous and mean the exact same thing. Image descriptions, no matter what they contain, always go into the alt-text. It’s like a law of physics, deviating from which is unimaginable.
If you talk about describing or explaining something in the post text body, whoosh, it flies over their heads. No matter how much sense that’d actually make.
Not to mention that you have to keep every post and every comment at 500 characters or below, otherwise a large number of Mastodon users will pretend you aren’t even there or mute or block you outright. I know that from personal experience. And there are things that simply can’t be discussed in glorified tweets.
Also, Mastodon seems to only know two kinds of pictures. One, screenshots of social media posts. The stuff that requires transcripts. Two, simple real-life photographs, especially cat pictures.
Edit: I over-emphasized the point about reaching a broader audience. If you want to discuss a narrow topic but you don’t want most ActivityPub users to see it because you don’t value their input, I guess Lemmy is as good as it gets.
Ideally, I’d discuss this topic with people from all over the Fediverse. And I want these people to discuss it with each other within the comments section. Mastodon users who really care a lot for accessibility, who want everyone’s needs to be catered to, and who are shooting for WCAG level AA, just as well as users of Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey etc. etc. who have much higher character limits in their post and users of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) who do not have a character limit.
I don’t just want a bunch of one-on-one discussions between myself and someone else. I want to discuss such matters with Mastodon users and non-Mastodon users, and I want the Mastodon users and the non-Mastodon users to read and reply to what the other side has written.
I want people on non-Mastodon projects to tell Mastodon users who only know Mastodon what things are like on other projects. I want Mastodon users to tell non-Mastodon users how important accessibility is and which aspects of accessibility is how important. And I want to learn from this discussion.
I want to read opinions and ideas from all over the Fediverse. And I want users from all over the Fediverse to read these opinions and ideas.
And in particular, I want to discuss with them edge-cases in accessibility that go far, far beyond Twitter/Mastodon screenshots and cat photographs.
There in Threadiverse there also exists !a11y@programming.dev community for discussing digital accessibility, however it’s not very active, but it does seem important
That’s an understatement. It’s nothing more than another link dump that doesn’t look like anyone wants to actually discuss something. And even as such, it’s almost dead. Like, one post in two months.
Also, it looks more like for “how do I, as a full-stack developer, make my Web app accessible” than for “how do I, as an end user, make my image posts accessible”. But I’m looking for the latter.
And, preferably, I’m looking for someplace where I don’t first have to explain most of the Fediverse to everyone because all they know is Lemmy (if it’s on Lemmy), or because all they know is Mastodon (if it’s on Mastodon or glued onto Mastodon like Guppe).
@JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works @fediverse@lemmy.world - https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks is a place where people discuss various ActivityPub implementations and potential improvements - primarily from a technological perspective (how the software is written), not as much from a cultural perspective (how users use the software), so it doesn’t directly answer your question, but it might still be helpful in some cases
Honestly, the mastodon obsession seems like a you problem. Talk about what you want on the fediverse. Maybe mastodon users see it, maybe they don’t, who cares.
Maybe you’ve overlooked that, but: I’m mainly on Hubzilla, not on Lemmy.
By far most of my connections on Hubzilla are on Mastodon. This means that my posts show up on a) Mastodon users’ personal timelines and b) the federated timelines of lots of Mastodon instances. This, in turn, means my content has to fulfill at least some of Mastodon’s cultural standards.
Also, I’m one of the few non-Mastodon users who do care for their reach on Mastodon. That’s because I’m probably one of the few Fediverse users to explain to Mastodon users the Fediverse outside of Mastodon. This is not the primary topic of my Hubzilla channel, but someone has to do that.
But if even more Mastodon users or entire Mastodon instances mute, block or shadow-block me for repeatedly flipping the bird at Mastodon’s etiquette and being unabashedly ableist, this becomes impossible because my explanations can’t reach their target audience anymore.
Even when I post about my primary topic, 3-D virtual worlds, I rely on being read on Mastodon. For it is there where the chances are the best for there being someone who is interested in that topic.
